CLEVELAND – “Beginning on January 20th 2017, safety will be restored,” Donald Trump said as he officially accepted the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday, scorching President Barack Obama for crime in his Chicago.
My compliments to Ivanka Trump. She was pretty impressive — an upbeat, calming voice for her billionaire, brusque, bullying, reality-show-star father, who delivered a buffed version of his stump speech.
The last night of the Republican convention featured not one, but two commercials for Trump’s hotel, residential and golf properties. One was narrated by son Don Jr., and the other by actor Jon Voight.
Usually these bio videos tell you a little more about the candidate — in Trump’s case, the hardscrabble life of the son of a multi-millionaire New York real estate tycoon.
OPINION
[protected-iframe id=”ee697792e276ae5262af738433a7cc7a-107184512-70352821″ info=”p+” class=”twitter-follow-button
Instead, Don Jr. reminded me in the video that Trump Tower in Manhattan was once the site of the Bonwit Teller department store.
And if you want me to go there, Don Jr., I will, since Trump’s demolition of the Bonwit’s represents a broken promise Trump made – to save the limestone reliefs of women the Metropolitan Museum of Art wanted – if they could be removed.
Somehow they ended up in pieces. For whatever reason. If preserving historic limestone sculptures is difficult, imagine how hard it is to run a country. Which gets me back to Trump, riding to the rescue after the Jan. 20 inauguration.
What he didn’t offer on the last night of the Republican convention — what he has not been saying in the months leading up to this night — were at least some clues how how this January miracle will take place.
A day after his inauguration, on Jan. 22, 2009, with much flourish, President Barack Obama signed an order requiring that the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba be closed within a year. That was a central, specific campaign promise that to this day has not been kept – because Republicans wouldn’t let it happen.
Trump will have to navigate among the Democrats in Congress who will return the GOP courtesies over these years in kind.
Trump blasted Clinton for “her bad instincts and her bad judgment – something pointed out by Bernie Sanders” and that’s what “caused many of the disasters unfolding today.”
Sanders never made a sweeping Clinton indictment, but the facts are not that important to Trump. In the biggest speech of his life, Trump made a stab at how he would “Make America Great Again.” But he still has a way to go to close the deal.
